Silent Sun of Russia
Sibylla Tuxen
»Do you think we could have changed something if everyone had stayed?«, asks one of the film’s characters. A direct answer to this question can never be found, but it is one that reverberates throughout the film, as well as through the conscience of the Russians who have left their country. What does it mean to have to choose between torture and life and therefore between opposition and exile?
The Russia that Sybilla Tuxen has been filming since 2018 is highly charged – she follows young people critical of the government in their everyday lives, as they hide behind window frames and with their faces bathed in the recurring light of the phones that share news and calls for rallies. It is a time when nothing stands still, caught between persecution and the hectic transfer of information. And these are years that seem to have been blurred by Vladimir Putin’s despotism. Also after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the film follows three women at the centre of this filmic documentation covering a long time period. We stay close to Alika, Alyona and Katya as their government turns against humanity. In exile in Georgia or Spain, we follow their powerlessness, their dreams, fears and doubts. While the first generation since the collapse of the Soviet Union seeks the chance to change Russia, exile plays stage to an internal struggle against their own government. A film that shows that Putin is not Russia and that the Russian opposition is stronger and braver than anyone can try and hide.
Sibylla Tuxen
Sybilla Tuxen graduated from Fatamorgana, the Photography School for Visual Media in Copenhagen and from the National Film School of Denmark in Copenhagen. After 2011, the film-maker spent several years living in St. Petersburg for several years and studied Russian. Her short film This Place We Call Our Home in 2014 focussed on the war in eastern Ukraine. In 2017, she made a short film following the patron saint Ksenia Petersburgskaya and looked at four women caught between power, hope, powerlessness and love in St. Petersburg. Silent Sun of Russia is her feature film debut and had its world premiere at CPH:DOX in 2023.
Films by Sybilla Tuxen
Ksenia Petersburgskaya 2017 | This Place We Call Our Home 2014